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First Christmas since everything happened

Christmas is coming!

I have always loved Christmas! I especially love Christmas musicnand  have a perfected Spotify playlist that I've worked on for years that almost always gives me chills. Some of my highlights are

  1. Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent by Red Mountain Church
  2. Christmas Canon  by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra
  3. Coventry Carol by Libera (and just about anything by them)
  4. Of the Father's Love Begotten by Fernando Ortega
  5. I Saw Three Ships by Sting
I just started playing the music tonight, still moves my heart.  

But I just don't know.  Everything feels different now. What is Christmas when you don't believe in God? When you think the virgin birth is an idea necessary to make sense of early understandings of how sin is transmitted to and through the human race?

To help guide me through Advent, I've cracked this book.
Product Details
The focus on this books is the meaning of Christmas. There's a lot of historical context highlighting the subversive nature of the Advent and substantive exegesis.  However, they don't believe the Christmas story was historical. They see the birth narratives as parables.  Mark and John had nothing and Luke and Matthew provide very different nativity accounts. 

I confess, I am not sure if I will get through the book though. I really wasn't digging the historical context...it's not new to me. I don't find the political discussion that exciting either because it just reminds me of N.T. Wright. I probably will though because I'm looking for something to hold onto with Christmas and I think it's mythological truth is valuable. 

I've had other random Christmas related thoughts:

I always felt special to share my birthday with Jesus.  Not sure I ever admitted to myself that Jesus wasn't born in December. But he wasn't. Chalk that up to another thing that turns out to be wrong.  Actually, I share my birthday with the celebration of the winter solstice. The shortest day, the darkest day. A day that could use some light. 

I feel like this season will be a tug of war between nostalgia and reason.  



             

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